Regular Internet users know that a well-written, plausible sounding horror-tale, framed as a true story that acts as a warning, travels at such astonishing speed in cyberspace that entire websites are devoted to recording and quashing these tales. A friend mailed us this story about a racket at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, where cashiers at the duty-free shops collude with the Thai police...

One day in 2002, Jim Leitner, a hedge-fund manager, read in The Economist that average beer consumption in Nigeria dropped from 34 litres to just three litres and then rebounded to four litres. He did some more research and bought Guinness of Nigeria which went up a few hundred per cent over the next three years. Marko Dimitrijevic, of Everest Capital, is all over the emerging markets. Along...